I have been playing osu!mania for a few months since I came to NUS.

I fell in love with this rtythm game at first sight when I saw others playing it, it is just the kind of game that I needed, a game that allows me to play and listen to good music at the same time. I even bought a T-shirt from their website and I wear it often when I go for lessons.

I was getting better and better at the game until December break where the progress has been very insignificant and I could not beat my own high-scores for almost a month.

A few days ago, when I was randomly watching some guy playing osu!mania on twitch tv, I discovered that I could actually control the speed that the notes fall(using F3 and F4 during the gameplay). This helped me a lot as previously there are songs that notes are either falling too slowly that all notes are stucked together, making them hard to distinguish, or falling too fast that my eye was not able to catch it. Thanks to the tip(or rather basic knowledge), I was able to get better scores on those maps where default speed was not optimum.

However, the major breakthrough came just now when I was playing some usual practice map with long notes and short notes appearing together. I tried something that I have never done before – focusing on the short notes and give less attention to long notes, and surprisingly, this turns out to work very well for me. Previously, I was only able to hit majority of long notes and I started to get lost when I tried to consider short notes as well. With this new strategy, I can hit majority of the short notes since I give it the main focus, and remaining bit of focus turns out to be sufficient for the long notes. Overall, I get almost one grade up for all the harder maps, from Cs to Bs and from Bs to As.

Well, although I am excited about it, it is clear to me that the next breakthrough would be even hard for me to get to. Keep osu!